Master pages, file size, and memory

[Woody44]

I need some advice and guidance with respect to using master pages in TextMaker. First, some background:

Several years ago, the 12-year old daughter of a good friend wrote a charming little story about a young girl dragon who became a heroine. At Thanksgiving (the American holiday in late November) she gave me a copy of the manuscript because she knew that I write and self-publish books. The story was surprisingly good, considering her age, and her father and I conspired to format it into a book and publish it (under her name) through Amazon. We did so, she was appropriately gobsmacked to see her book in print, and it has actually sold a few copies.

At the time, I was using Microsoft Office 2016. Doing the book as a basic book, even with a custom page size, was easy enough. I originally wanted to decorate the corners of each page with a scroll resign, but that caused a lot of problems. The scrolls were images, which meant four images on every page. The file size exploded.

Worse, I wasn't able to make the images match up with the page margins and gutter margin settings. I constantly had the scroll images on right-hand pages with margins for left-hand pages, and vice-versa. In the end, I gave up, and we did the book without the artwork on the interior pages.

TextMaker offers master pages, like my old desktop publishing software from MS-DOS days. I have never worked with master pages in TextMaker. If two master pages (left-hand and right-hand) are set up in TextMaker, each with a scroll image in each of the four corners, does each page of the book add the size of four images to the resulting file size? Or do the master pages carry the images, and the individual book body pages only hold text?

I hope that's clear.

[Jossi]

I've made the test. A tmdx document with four corner graphics on the master page and one line of text has a size of 54 kB. The same document with 20 pages of text has 57 kB. So, obviously, the graphics on the master page is counted only once.